Visual Studio Online Defines 'Visual' in New Team Interface

The latest sprint for Visual Studio Online, number 90, sports new dashboard capabilities that are meant to replace the Team Overview page, as well as improved pull request and testing features.

"One of the most popular improvements released this sprint are our new dashboards," writes Microsoft's Brian Harry, in a blog today." We've been dogfooding them internally for a few sprints now and some of my feature teams have put together some very nice dashboards." Harry said that the dashboards have been in preview with Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 1 RC that was released in early October.

With the new dashboards, team administrators can add a number of dashboards or widgets to the main page, with pages being fully customizable. There are also a few new widgets: conditional query tile that turns from red to green when work items reach a threshold; a code tile that shows recent commits; a query tile for a quick view of work items; and a markdown tile for linkable annotations. These and other widget are available through a widget catalog. Custom widgets can also be coded, since all widgets are hooked in as extensions.

This sprint also improves on pull requests, with new filters that allow for more granular views of pulls requests. In the pull request hub are filters for "Mine" and "All," which, when clicked, will filter pull requests accordingly. Two new testing features are also included: Manual test results that were once only viewable from Microsoft Test Manager are now viewable from the Test hub group's Run tab; test results data cleanup has been simplified and no longer requires another tool to remove results and attachments, and it's wrapped into a test retention policy.

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